Friday, August 10

Very Excited (and bonus kid funnies)

Lori over at Queen of Dirty Laundry has started a regular feature called "Advice Forum Friday." I must admit, I'm pretty excited about it. I often find myself wondering how other parents deal with certain issues, but I'm mostly too embarrassed to ask such things of the moms I know in person.

So, here goes. As I may or may not have mentioned lately, we are working at phasing diapers out of our lives. Yeeha! My daughter's doing pretty well at most aspects of remembering to use the bathroom for her expulsion needs, but we're discovering a disturbing trend.

Several times in the past few weeks, she has gone to use the facilities of her own initiative. While we are home, she can take care of things mostly all by herself and will often only tell us after the fact. That part I'm okay with. It's the Show and Tell (or worse yet, Hide and Smell) aspect of this little procedure that's beginning to get to me.

We have told her several times that touching her own waste is not a good idea, I may have even shouted it at the top of my lungs once or twice. Every episode so far has been followed by a trip back to the bathroom, a reintroduction to the functions of each plumbing fixture, a very thorough hand washing, and a reminder that she has made a bad choice and must learn to make better choices in the future.

Am I doing this right? Because it hasn't seemed very effective so far. Is she just so interested in what comes out of her that she can't keep her little fingers to herself? Honestly, not one of the parenting articles I've read covered this sort of thing. What do I do?

And for the promised funnies:

1) Adam has recently begun singing "Jesus Loves Me" to our daughter at bedtime. She's been really interested in songs and singing lately, and has been picking up the words incredibly quickly, albeit with a bit of a twist. Her version of the song goes, "Jesus yummy, sigh no!"

2) We were grocery shopping and she got a special treat: Rather than having to sit in the cart's fold out seat, we got one of the bigger carts with a two-seat bench that let her sit like the big kids. At one point on our way to the pretzel aisle, she twisted around in her seat and grabbed for the metal bar across the back. She held on with both hands. "What are you doing?" I asked. She looked up with a grin, "I pushing!"

When my kids did that, I tried to deal with it very matter-of-factly, but in a way that let them feel the inconvenience. For instance, making them stay in the bathroom with me and "help" while I cleaned up the area, or washing them in the bathtub under rather cold running water.

I also explained to them that their poop is their body's way of getting rid of anything in their food that's not good for them, and anything that might make them sick. So handling it is yucky and could make them sick.

Author

I'm a middle-aged homemaker. My husband and I have a daughter and two sons. Read here my musings on faith, marriage, parenting, crochet, fertility, cooking, sociology, homeschooling, and whatever else is on my mind.